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Comment by minraws | Hacker News Reader

I had some thoughts but for context.

Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)??

Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?

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I strongly suspect a big chunk of their revenue was enterprise where it was probably used as a CRUD app / Access replacement with proper controls. That's low hanging fruit for Claude and friends, so their renewals/ARR must have started dropping off and they sold while the selling was good.

I suspect most enterprises aren’t Claude-ing up in house replacements for tools like this, for the same reason most enterprises are using cloud providers rather than managing their own data centers. A big part of what they’re paying for is to make it “Somebody Else’s Problem” for something they don’t consider a core competetency.

That's a really interesting theory! Thanks for surfacing it.

By the way, Grist is Airtable-like and has RBAC down to every row and cell, enforced live. And you can self-host it. Check it out: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/

(FYI, I work at Grist.)

You could say the same about Retool but their enterprise customers appreciate the SSO among other security forward features.

Eyeing Wikipedia it seems like it sold for about raised capital. Probably very little product value but some b2b contracts to milk?

My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.

I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.

(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)

Probably they are getting eaten by new AI integrations and the numbers don’t look good.

It’s strange, I thought they were in pole position to integrate into vibe coded apps with bolt and co. Maybe be a strategy issue?

It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.

Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?

> It's used by non technical people so not sure AI is the competition.

I mean yes but most of them are vibe coding apps now

> Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?

Most probably, but their market share must have free fall for such valuation

you'd be amazed how little people are vibe coding their apps to have alternatives. I mean i recently did for a club, but other clubs are still buying the SaaS-solution for 250$ a year, while having more members and i'd assume at least 1 technical person, that knows what they are doing.

that cant be right if so they got an excellent deal ...$1BN cash (!)

Deals of this type are usually cash free and debt free. The cash went to the shareholders. Hence the implied valuation of $2.5B.

ARR has always been a bullshit number but it is an especially bullshit number nowadays because AI has destroyed software margins.

> AI has destroyed software margins.

Nobody wants to talk about or reveal the AI or software margins.

Will cause everyone to panic once they see how low the margins are getting year over year.

I guess in the sense that if your goal is to sell, you'd optimize on revenues. That being said, when I look at an income statement I am usually more suspect of costs than revenues.

If these numbers are remotely true, there's either a crucial number missing or investors are utter idiots who forced this sale. Won't be surprised if it's the latter.

Assuming M&A deals take at least a few months to close, this acquisition was probably set in motion around April, when SaaS sentiment was near rock bottom and cash-flow machines like Cloudflare, Adobe, and Snowflake were getting crushed simply because Anthropic announced something.

I think the revenues must have taken a hit or growth was getting harder, otherwise this doesn't make sense also IV is 2.25B so assuming cash went to investors + some employee equity. I don't think other than early investors and founders others made much of anything.

But if the revenues were hit this might be a home run, given AI could replace all of airtable in about a weekend e2e, but then again a competent team of 2-3 devs could have done it over a few weeks, it wasn't ever really about the product quality.

My condolences to all the Airtable users, who are about to get fleeced now, they should consider moving to anything else, even vibe coded slop might be ok.

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